10 Museum Exhibitions You’ll Be Talking About This Winter

An overlooked 20th-century African-American artist who is now getting the recognition she deserves (partly due to first lady Michelle Obama hanging two of her paintings at the White House), Alma Thomas (1891-1978) will be the subject of a retrospective at this beautiful and underrated university museum. Though she was often associated with the so-called “Washington Color School,” Thomas’ elegant output dwarfed this classification thanks to a unique perspective and an undeniable talent with paint. Her status should be bumped up to “American treasure” as soon as possible.

It’s not often that an art critic becomes a fine artist in order to make more money, but that is exactly what this writer and poet did in Belgium in the middle of the 20th century. The brilliant and quixotic Broodthaers had a fantastic eye as well as a predictive view of the future of art; taking Duchamp’s legacy of objet trouvé art and running with it long before it became fashionable. His rich and poetic sculptures and paintings made from eggshells, hats and mussels still hold enormous seductive power, and thanks to him, all the hipsters in the city feel the need to put potted plants in their exhibitions. It’s frankly unbelievable that this is his first New York museum retrospective, but it should end up a high point for a museum that has been on a roll of late.

Here’s an important show that brings the work of four compelling female Modernist artists—Marguerite Zorach, Florine Stettheimer, Helen Torr and Georgia O’Keeffe—together for the first time. The show focuses on the “feminine” side of Modernism and what that means for artists who were determined not to be defined by their sex. Both masters of their craft and trailblazers for modern sexual identity, the influence of these four women is immeasurable, and their fingerprints can be found all over the art world today.

This is the first comprehensive look at the North Carolina school that changed the direction of 20th century American art. An interdisciplinary and experimental college that gave equal attention to both visual arts and applied arts (as well as architecture, poetry, music and dance), Black Mountain was clever enough to hire future icons like Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage and Buckminster Fuller as faculty, and predictably, a bevy of all-star students followed, including Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine de Kooning, Cy Twombly and many more. The Hammer will display a vast array of paintings, sculptures, weavings and pottery produced during the legendary 14-year run of the school, alongside documentary photographs, poetry books, sound works and live performances. A must see for serious art lovers.

This will be the first show ever to explore the three (and only three) paintings that Vincent Van Gogh made of his bedroom in Arles, France, over his lifespan. Thirty-six related works will be on view, along with ephemera owned by the artist himself. There will even be a digitally enhanced reconstruction of the room inside the museum, so viewers can stand in the shoes of one of the most beloved—and talented—nutballs to ever pick up a paintbrush.

Pop Art’s embrace of popular culture and imagery became a worldwide phenomenon that we’re all familiar with, but the always on-point Philadelphia Museum of Art will give us an in-depth look at an influence that found its way around the world. This show includes a surprising array of Pop Artists from Japan, Brazil, Poland and practically every other distant shore or mountaintop on the earth. The exhibition, which was curated by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, features 120 artworks by superstars like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha, and lesser-known Pop practitioners such as Brazilian artist Antonio Dias and the Icelandic artist Erró.

“The Open Road,” organized by the photo gurus at the Aperture Foundation, features over 100 images by 19 photographers (from the 1950s to today) on the topic of hitting the highway. This star-studded list of button-pushers includes Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Justine Kurland and more. Together, they investigate the symbolic freedom and temporal beauty of our country’s unique car culture.

Architect Marcel Breuer finally gets his name attached to his beloved Brutalist building, courtesy of its new tenant, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (The Whitney Museum is leasing the space to its uptown elder cousin.) The “Met Breuer,” as it’s now called, will open in March and will be inaugurated by three exhibitions: “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” 197 works from the Renaissance to today that consider what completion means to an artwork; a retrospective of the exceptional Indian Modernist painter Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990); and a series of performances by the Met’s current artist-in-residence, Vijay Iyer. Heads up: This is the biggie on New York’s spring art and social calendar.

This photographer’s career was just too big for one museum, which is why this survey sprawls across both the LACMA and the Getty in Los Angeles. Very few artists have so successfully rendered the abject, or “alternative,” as seductively and beautifully as Mapplethorpe, and this survey emphatically proves that point with a treasure trove of drawings, collages, Polaroids and photographs. Mapplethorpe was an exploratory force in his brief time, but fortunately we still get to muse on and marvel at his landmark images of power and sympathy.